
This report discusses progress and developments at the AEA RCT Registry, on behalf of the AEA Oversight Committee for Registry of Randomized Controlled Trials.

## Overview

The AEA RCT Registry provides services to the economics (and social science) community at large. Managed at J-PAL and funded by the AEA, registration at the Registry is mandatory for field experiments published in American Economic Review (AER), American Economic Review: Insights (AERI), American Economic Journal: Applied Economics (AEJAPP), and American Economic Journal: Economic Policy (AEJPOL), but is also used more broadly in the economics discipline, with numerous publications in top economics journals as well as field journals citing pre-registration in the Registry (see the [Data Registry  Usage](#monitoring-usage) section). The Registry is available at [https://www.socialscienceregistry.org/](www.socialscienceregistry.org).

## Committee Membership

At the Meeting of the AEA's Executive Committee in January 2025, the Oversight Committee for the Registry for Randomized Controlled Trials was reconstituted. The committee is charged with reviewing registry operations, methods, and performance, as well as considering ways to make the Registry more sustainable from a financial perspective for the Association. Lars Vilhuber was appointed as chair of the committee for a renewable three-year term ending in December 2027. Esther Duflo, Edward Miguel, and Nicholas Bloom are the other members of the committee, all appointed for a three-year term. Sarah Kopper, who is responsible for the Registry at J-PAL, participates in a non-voting capacity. 

## Activities of the Committee

The committee met on 26 March 2025, 22 May 2025, and 28 August 2025. Schedule conflicts prevented a December 2025 meeting. 

### Sustainability of the Registry 

The AEA Executive Committee voted in January 2025 to have a default fee of $50 per registration, allowing for declared hardship. The RCT committee, having reflected on this, proposed a different schedule with a default of $0. It should also be noted that, as of the end of 2025, the fee structure and its defaults have not yet been determined. 


##  Activities at J-PAL

In collaboration with members of the AEA's *Oversight Committee for Registry of Randomized Controlled Trials*, the Registry team at J-PAL ("J-PAL Team") continue to work on improving the usability of the Registry, as well as ensuring the availability of Registry data.

### Enhancing usability

Over the past year the J-PAL Team has focused on two projects to increase the usability of the Registry:

1. The Team implemented the findings from the Sloan-funded RCT [@Cavanagh_2023]. The RCT was conducted on Registry users in 2023 to determine the effect of nudges designed to increase post-trial reporting rates. Complete post-trial information, such as whether data collection has ended and when, links to any paper/report available for the study, and links to any published data/code, is important for helping fulfill the Registry's goal of reducing the "file-drawer problem" by providing a comprehensive database of RCTs in the social sciences. The Team implemented two learnings from the RCT: first, they changed the post-trial reminder email to follow the text in the most effective treatment arm -- the "salience" intervention, enumerating the fields which are still blank.  Second, they increased the frequency with which those emails are sent. Prior to the change, emails were sent once at the trial end date, and then once again two years past the trial end date. After the change, emails are sent up to four times at each milestone,[^milestone] depending on whether any update is made to the trial (if so, reminders are stopped for that milestone). 
2. The Team continues to work on improving the quality and flexibility of the data exported every month from the Registry. Currently, each month, a CSV and a JSON version of the public data from the Registry is exported (for instance, [@aearegistry2025]). The export functionality is being  expanded to  include a SQL format (which is close to the native representation of the data in the Registry).  This format has two advantages: first, it is useful to the larger community: any researcher/organization that wanted to use it as the base for their own front-end would easily be able to. Second, it will help the Team maintain a more flexible and lightweight front-end, and easily experiment with different changes. Front-end changes being considered are a re-design so that registrations are picked up by Google Scholar, and export to RePEc. 

[^milestone]: That is, four times each both at trial end date and then at two years past trial update

### Enhancing operational efficiency

Given the increased staff time necessary to keep up with an increasing rate of registrations, the Team has worked to  reduce non-staff operating costs for the Registry. Since the last report [@10.1257/pandp.115.944], web-hosting services have been transferred to a new host in order to reduce monthly costs. The new monthly web-hosting costs are roughly 80% lower -- shifting from approximately 450 USD/month to approximately 90 USD/month, even while the Registry database has been growing.

### Additional outreach

With the approval of the RCT Committee, the Team has implemented a partnership with the [Social Science Prediction Platform](https://socialscienceprediction.org/) in which language pointing to their platform is included in the confirmation emails for any pre-registered trials. This type of outreach is open to other projects, subject to the approval of the RCT Committee.
